Why Don't We Have Foolproof Voting Machines Yet?

A dozen years have passed since the controversies and recounts of the 2000 presidential elections, and still we're using old-fashioned paper ballots. What gives? Here's why so many Americans will find themselves voting for Romney or Obama with a pen and paper rather than a modern voting machine.

Despite all those hanging chad jokes—not to mention the $3.9 billion in federal funding committed to upgrading the nation's election equipment since 2002—we're back to using paper ballots. How is that possible?

If we can invent a machine that dispenses money, surely we can come up with one that safely chooses the next name on the Oval Office door, right?

Well, engineering a perfect democracy is more difficult than you might imagine. For a country with many languages and many ballot initiatives, touchscreen machines once seemed like the obvious choice. Much like ATMs, they could accommodate non-English speakers and the visually impaired, provide step-by-step instructions, prompt people to confirm their choices, and quickly tabulate the results. But they were plagued from the start by hardware problems. Machines overheated and shut down. Memory cards failed. Reboots erased votes.

Touchscreen machines were also prone to human error. In 2004, 4438 votes in Carteret County, N.C., went missing. The hardware worked just fine, but local administrators had inadvertently programmed the software to accept fewer votes than the community required. In November 2006, ­nearly 18,000 people in Florida left the voting booth without choosing a candidate in a tight congressional race. The culprit was bad ballot design. Administrators had innocently placed two races on one screen and voters, accustomed to one race per screen, simply overlooked the option on the bottom.

The biggest concern, though, was that touchscreen machines could be hacked. Not during actual elections—not even under real-world conditions—but hacked nonetheless. In July 2003, a team of computer scientists from Johns Hopkins University announced that it had reprogrammed the market-leading Diebold AccuVote-TS by popping a lock and replacing the memory card. In truth, this posed no real threat to democracy: The team enjoyed many unique advantages over would-be fixers, including unfettered access to the machine and its source code. But the story proved irresistible to the media, drawing even more hackers to the arena. Together, they exposed a fundamental flaw that was, in light of 2000, fatal: Electronic voting left no paper trail. In a disputed election, voters had little choice but to trust the machines. If tallies were lost—to malfunction or malfeasance—there was no way to get them back.

So a makeshift solution was proposed: voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPAT). The idea was to outfit touchscreens with paper rolls that would record votes like receipts. In short order, several states passed legislation requiring some form of the VVPAT system. On election day in May 2006, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, conducted the first major test. It was a disaster. Twenty percent of the printers malfunctioned. Precinct volunteers were not trained to fix them. Voters didn't understand how they worked. They were supposed to confirm their votes on paper before they submitted them, but according to field observations in later trials, most did not.

And so electronic voting machines fell from favor. Just 25 percent of the country will use paperless systems this year—down from 40 percent in 2006. A full 67 percent will rely largely or exclusively on mark-sense systems—the reliable fill-in-the-bubble ballots that date back to the '70s. By 2016, when states such as Florida, Colorado, and Maryland are scheduled to retire their electronic systems, that number will rise to nearly 75 percent.

It's easy to poke fun at the ­irony of that saga. But if you take a step back and examine the whole sorry exercise, you'll find that it was destined to stifle innovation. The market for election equipment is tiny, and the federal certification process is painfully slow. Given the deadlines attached to Washington's $3.9 billion handout, it made far more sense for companies to tweak the preapproved technology and rush to market. By the time their creations were discredited, local election commissioners were staring at budgets ravaged by the recession.

This is nothing new, of course. Election boards are perennially starved for funds. That's why polling places are so often staffed with ill-prepared volunteers. In that respect, mark-sense voting machines are ideal. Paper and pencils cost relatively little. They require no maintenance. By contrast, touchscreens sell for roughly $6000 apiece. And, like all things digital, they quickly grow outdated. You can't go replacing them every three years, not when county citizens are demanding new streetlights and bridge repairs. "For every machine that's purchased," one expert says, "there's a picture of a schoolteacher who wasn't hired."

Assuming that a truly innovative voting machine design successfully conquered those issues, it would still have to satisfy the conflicting requirements in 50 states. Ohio law, for example, recognizes the paper receipt in a touchscreen machine as the official vote. Next door in Pennsylvania, the memory card reigns supreme. Paper scrolls are illegal because they might allow a nosey administrator in a tiny farm town to observe the order in which his neighbors arrived and decipher how each had voted.

For many people, Internet voting represents the obvious next step. The French and the Estonians, even some Canadians, have cast their votes online. It's private, accessible, inexpensive. But the process is not completely secure and, as of yet, it can't be audited. Two years ago, a research team from the University of Michigan hacked a major test run in Washington, D.C., altering every vote and reprogramming the site to play the Wolverines' fight song.

In the end, it seems, there's little reward to solving the nation's election woes. The downside, however, is considerable. In 2007, fed up with the fallout from its elections division, Diebold decided to divorce itself from the venture. First it renamed the division Premier Election Solutions. Then the company sold it for $5 million. IBM—the company that popularized punch cards—fled the business back in 1969.

"There is no perfect voting system because there are no perfect people," Connie McCormack says. And she's got the cred to back up that remark. As an administrator in Dallas, San Diego, and L.A., she has observed dozens of elections since 1981. She even spent a year in Russia as a consultant. She can list myriad polling site problems. When it comes to the machinery, though, she couldn't be more complimentary. "Punch cards were inappropriately maligned," she says of 2000. "What really happened in Florida is that they didn't clean their equipment."

That doesn't mean that the mark-sense system most voters are using today is drawback-free. Because the ballots are filled out by human hands, there's room for human error. Some people make check marks instead of filling in the ovals. Others try to correct mistakes and fail to erase them fully. Voters tap their pencils while making a decision and create stray marks. As Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, likes to say: "The American public knows how to foul up a paper ballot—we've been doing it very well for a long time."

It would be wrong, however, to call the last 10 years a lost decade. Lessons were learned. Better ballot design has reduced the number of overlooked votes. Tougher federal voting standards have addressed security vulnerabilities. And, even on the worst days, touchscreens and paper ballots outperform the rusty junk they replaced. The so-called residual rate—the proportion of ballots that record no vote in the main contest—is about 1.5 percent today. After factoring in deliberate no-votes and hand-counted write-ins, that number drops to less than 1 percent. For the most part, you can chalk that up to voters' mistakes.

Let's not forget, though, that nationwide, 1 percent translates to more than 1 million votes. If this year's race proves as tight as the one in 2000—as you may recall, Bush won by a mere 528 votes in Florida—the new technology won't be any better at selecting a winner. It's still too crude to distinguish between voter intent and voter error. But there may be a way to fix that—one that takes the guesswork out of the equation. Boston-based startup Clear Ballot Group has come up with an independent audit system that uses off-the-shelf scanners, laptops, and proprietary software to read and evaluate mark-sense ballots. The only inputs required are the marked ballots and the PDFs from which those ballots were printed. Processing up to 60,000 ballots an hour, the system rapidly identifies questionable, under, and overvotes. Only then are the results compared with the official count to identify discrepancies. Election officials can view the dubious ballots onscreen, and if necessary, retrieve them with ease from the thousands of ballot bundles by using Clear Ballot's identification system. A recount that once took weeks can now be done in a matter of hours.

The system will be tested in seven Florida counties this year. And CEO Larry Moore is talking to New York officials about giving it a go. His goal is to have a fully scalable system ready for 2016. Ideally, Clear Ballot's system would open the audit process to public scrutiny. "Think of it as a CAT scan," he says, "that allows an ordinary citizen to see the exact count of a large election in a matter of minutes and understand that the count was arrived at fairly." That wouldn't guarantee universal satisfaction with the winner, of course. But it would make certain who won—and who lost. And that's more than we could say 12 years ago.

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